He's a clever, amoral, American capitalist trying to make it
in Europe. You know, like McDonalds and Starbucks.

************** Well, I'll be darned. And I thought it was a
Marxist allegory, with Ripley rising up in proletariat
splendor and justly redistributing Greenleaf's bourgeois
wealth, stolen from the sweat of the workers' brow. Where the
wealth gets redistributed to seems fairly accurate
historically speaking, too.